Moodle and how it can be used effectivley to support learning and teaching is just one of the many things that JISC RSC Wales offer advice and guidance on. I am very conscious that over the last month or so I have been tweeting lots of really interesting stuff that I have seen about Moodle BUT that as not everyone is a Twitter fan (or follower) it might be an idea to collect all of the Moodle stuff I have seen in one place … so here goes:

Moodle 2.0 is due any day now (I think) and there have been a few good introductory videos including this one on You Tube from @moodlefairy: ‘A brief tour of Moodle 2.0′ . There is also a Moodle 2.0 demo site if you are interested in fnding out more for yourself at: http://qa.moodle.net/

A new Moodle Educational demo site is in the process of being put together and details about how it is progressing can be found on Tomaz Lasic’s website.

The recent Moodle ‘Cool Course’ competition winners were announced a few weeks ago. All of the winning courses can be found and downloaded on the competition site

2 Moodle plugins that have come to my attention recently are:

• Moodle plugin for Microsoft Office 2007. I have plugged in and tried this one and after a bit of help from this blog it worked well. I can see how useful it would be for anyone who has Word documents that they want to update in Moodle or who wants an easy way to upload new documents … although I have to admit that I won’t be using it very often myself because I rarely upload Word docs to our Moodle, preferring to go for a more accessible pdf version, a Google Doc or other potentially more accesible and flexible alternatives. More about the tool can be found here on Moodle Monthly
• Easy Voter for Moodle, from Solihull College. I discovered this when I was looking for (free) alternatives to the audience response systems/voting sytems, like Turning Point and Qwizdom. It is a free plugin that basically enable you to create an interactive quiz to use in real time with learners BUT the learners need to have access to computers in order to participate. Here is more information about how Solihull College (the developers) use Easy Voter as well as  a case study from Cumbernauld College about how they are using it too.

Moodle use seems to be growing and growing, not just within the education sector but also within industry. Tesco, Subaru and Cisco are just some of the big names in industry that I have heard of recently who are using Moodle to support workplace learning. This article in the Western Mail (Wales Online) from Dr Geoff Elliot, Pembrokeshire College, also highlights the Moodle situation in Wales.

Moodle events are happening worldwide all of the time but closer to home the recent MoodleMootUK 2010 appears to have been a success, with more information available on their website. In the wake of MoodleMoot UK 2010, the first UK TeachMeetMoodle has also been organised for 3rd July in London. Closer to home again (for JISC RSC Wales) we helped to organise another of the very well attended ‘Moodle Meets’ for the Moodle-Wales users and videos and resources from the ‘Prepare to share’ event can be found online in our Moodle. Moodle also features in a number of the sessions in our forthcoming ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymr Digidol’ event on 30th June in Cardiff.

I shall end this post on that final note of blatant promotion for our annual big event … but will no doubt be tweeting oodles more Moodle stuff over the coming months.

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file)

Tags: moodle

This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Accessibility, elearning, eteaching, Learning Technology, moodle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.